We have at the very end of Samson’s life a lesson emphasized for us, that if we are to be true victors, we must be victors over self. It was when Samson had done with Samson—alas, it was at the end of his life—he was done with the power of the enemy too. What is it that makes a happy deathbed for a Christian rather rare? People speak of a happy deathbed as a remarkable thing. Why so? It ought to be an ordinary thing for God’s people going home to Him. I believe that you will often find that a Christian never gets to the end of himself until he gets to his deathbed. Really, his whole life has been spent more or less in temporizing with the world, until he gets face to face with eternal issues, and there is an end of self as there is an end of life. His liberated soul flashes before us just as it goes up to God.

This should not be so. We ought to reach our deathbed long before that. We ought to reach the end of self long before that; surely so. The end of self should be reached at the cross, and there we should abide, always counting ourselves dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let us reach the end, not in the providence of God, not under His chastening hand. Let us reach the end, not merely as Samson did, in crushing the life out of ourselves, but calmly and deliberately, applying the cross in faith to all that is of the old man, so that it may be not I that live, but Christ that lives in me. Then for us the story would be inverted, as it were, and we would begin where Samson ended.